Das Kapital Intellectual Influences

The purpose of Das Kapital (1867) was a scientific foundation for the politics of the modern labour

movement. The analyses were meant "to bring a science, by criticism, to the point where it can be

dialectically represented" and so "reveal the law of motion of modern society"[citation needed] to

describe how the capitalist mode of production was the precursor of the socialist mode of production. The

argument is a critique of the classical economics of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill and

Benjamin Franklin, drawing on the dialectical method that G. W. F. Hegel developed in Science of Logic

and The Phenomenology of Spirit; other intellectual influences on Capital were the French socialists

Charles Fourier, Comte de Saint-Simon, Jean Charles Léonard de Sismondi and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon;

and the Greek philosophers, especially Aristotle.[citation needed]

At university, Marx wrote a dissertation comparing the philosophy of nature in the works of the

philosophers Democritus (circa 460–370 BC) and Epicurus (341–270 BC). The logical architecture of

Das Kapital is derived in part from the Politics and the Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle, including the

fundamental distinction between use value and exchange value, the "syllogisms" (C-M-C' and M-C-M')

for simple commodity circulation and the circulation of value as capital. Moreover, the description of

machinery, under capitalist relations of production, as "self-acting automata" derives from Aristotle’s

speculations about inanimate instruments capable of obeying commands as the condition for the abolition

of slavery. In the nineteenth century, Marx’s research of the available politico-economic literature

required twelve years, usually in the British Library, London.